You want me to Date You?

Chapter Nine

Here's the next chapter for everyone! I hope that you are enjoying this story as much as I am writing it. I love making things different than what actually happened. Please vote and review!

House stood outside on the roof of the hospital. He sighed to himself as he looked out into the night sky and leaned against the wall when Stacy barged through the door. He rolled his eyes, "Oh great..."

"The man is sick, paranoid, and you kept badgering him about me during his PET scan?!" She hollered.

House scoffed. "The questions I asked him were designed to define the operational parameters of his limbic system –"

"Oh, don't give me that crap. You can say all the medical terminology that you want, but you were just screwing with him! That's low even for you." Stacy crossed her arms over her chest and huffed.

"Medical screwing... it's what I do after all."

"Then you run away like a ten year old. You come and hide on this roof like you always do!"

House turned to face Stacy and sighed. "I haven't been on this roof in five years." He watched as Stacy drew her shoulders together and took a couple of steps back. He rolled his eyes and turned back to face the city. "I don't know what's wrong with him. It's not Alzheimer's, it's not encephalitis, it's not environmental, and it's not immunological. Every test has been negative, every time. He's perfectly healthy, but his brain is dying."

Stacy began to sniffle. "It never occurred to me that you wouldn't figure out what is wrong with him." House nodded and let her walk over to him for a hug.

"I'm not going to give up on him, you know that."

Stacy nodded and pulled away from him and wiped her tears. "So what do we do now?"

"We wait."

"Wait? For what?" she asked.

"We wait for something to change. It's one of the great tragedies of life, something always changes."

At that moment House's pager decided to sound and he retrieved it from his pocket. "Head back down stairs."

"What, Why?"

House looked up at Stacy and nodded to the stairs. "Something changed... go." He watched as she turned quickly and pulled open the door and left him standing there on the roof. 'I guess I better go see what's up with Mark too.' He sighed and made his way to the door himself and slowly walked down the flight of stairs that would lead him to the nearest elevator. When he arrived at Mark's room, he furrowed his brows together. "What's going on?" he asked.

Mark looked up at House incredulously. "My-my toes they started to tingle, then-then I felt nothing." He looked over at Stacy, who was sitting beside him in a chair. "I'm scared... please hold my hand."

House and Stacy both looked down to see that Stacy was already holding Mark's hand. "Time moves on... he's paralyzed."

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The team all sat around the table while House stood in front of his white board. House tapped his cane on the ground as he thought before he sighed. "Any ideas?"

"His symptoms are mimicking a peripheral nervous system that is under attack" Foreman said as he looked towards the white board that was listed with all of Mark's symptoms. "But he's experiencing significant paresthesia, and he can't move his hands or toes."

House nodded as he continued to thump his cane on the floor. "It's peripheral. Guillain-Barre syndrome attacks there, not in the brain."

Foreman shook his head in disagreement. "No. I already did an indirect Coombs' test. No glutination, no antibodies to suggest that's happening."